


Lunch in Space

by kalirush



Category: Rolling Stones - Robert Heinlein
Genre: Broccoli, Cooking, Cooking in Zero-G is Complicated in Certain Fundamental Ways, Family, Gen, Hydroponics, Spaceships, zero-gravity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-18
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-21 12:06:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/597568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalirush/pseuds/kalirush
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meade Stone grows things, cooks, and argues with her family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pts/gifts).



“Chief Engineer Grandma?” Meade said sweetly, ducking her head into the room. “Would you please tell Buster to stay out of my garden? He may think he’s clever, but he’s killing my broccoli. I’d tell him myself, but he obviously doesn’t listen to me.”

Hazel looked across the chessboard at Lowell. “Best do as she says, Junior,” she commented.

“But she’s wrong about the salinity gradients-” he protested.

“Grandmother dearest,” Meade said, her hands on her hips. “Why does everyone aboard this ship assume I am incapable of doing math?”

“Beats me,” Hazel said. “I tutored you myself; you can handle a differential with the best of ‘em.”

“I checked the gradients!” Lowell insisted. “Your feeds are too low, they are.”

Meade glared at him. “And what you’re missing, like I _told you_ , is that the H670 units don’t filter as efficiently as they’re specced to. You get extra salt left in the solutions, and you have to compensate.”

Lowell shook his head. “The solutions I made should work.”

Hazel shook her head back at him. “Irrelevant,” she said. “First, your sister is Hydroponics Master aboard this ship this haul, so what she says goes. And if you don’t like it, then I can talk to the Cap’n about it. I happen to know that he has some draconian ideas about insubordination. Second, you’re killing the broccoli, and I like broccoli. Third, we’ve been hauling aboard this boat for better’n two years, and the garden’s been your sister’s baby the entire time. What makes you think she doesn’t know how to handle it?”

“Fine,” Lowell said, sullenly.

Meade gave him the stinkeye. “I’m going to go make lunch,” she said. “I was going to harvest some of the broccoli today, but I’m going to have to nurse that back to health before we can eat it.” 

Then she launched herself out of the room. Really, being able to properly stalk out of a room was the only thing Meade missed about gravity at this point. She was far more comfortable out of gravity than in it. She twisted, caught a handhold with her foot, and pushed off for the hydroponics section. The garden was an island of green-and-growing in the middle of the _Stone_. It was pretty much Meade’s favorite place aboard ship- not least because Castor and Pollux avoided it so thoroughly. Not that Meade didn’t _like_ her brothers. But still; a girl wanted a little peace and quiet now and again.

She harvested a salad’s worth of lettuce, taking care to adjust the nutrient flow. She’d give the chambers a day to recharge, and then she’d replant. The nice thing about lettuce was that it grew so fast- seed to harvest in a little under three weeks, if she was careful with her temps. The broad leaves also had good CO2 exchange. She picked a cucumber as well, and a couple tomatoes. Then, with a cheery wave for her plants, she sailed off toward the galley.

Mother still did most of the cooking for dinner, but Meade typically did both breakfast and lunch these days. It had taken a while for her to get the hang of zero-g cooking (well, cooking at all, if she was honest), but now she suspected she’d flub it if she had to cook under gravity. She hooked her feet into the handholds near the prep station and clipped her bag to the wall. Then she fished out the cucumber and wrangled it, the knife, and a cutting bag onto the sticky strip on the counter. She carefully rendered the cucumber into pieces- which was harder than it sounded. The bits always wanted to fly off anywhere but where she wanted them to go. She had enough experience by now, though, to be able to twitch them into the right bag and keep them there.

The tomato was even trickier; it was too juicy. Trying to leave it in pieces was a sure-fire way to spend her afternoon chasing globs of tomato seed around the galley. Usually, she cut off the ends and then baked it in a bag in the oven until it was all pulp and liquid. Then she added the salad dressing powder until she had a good paste, and then she put the torn-up lettuce and chopped-up cucumber straight into the bag.

Once she had the salad together, she started on the easy part of the meal. She added water to a package of pasta noodles and put that and a can of sauce to bake. She marked both items off the stores list and checked to see whether they could spare some garlic bread as well.

“Salad again?” Pollux complained, flying into the galley. Which was a sign that she was running late; the twins were always on time for meals.

“I can always put you on galley duty for a few days if you think you can do better,” Roger Stone commented, drifting in behind him with Castor at his heels. 

Half a loaf, Meade decided, and pulled it out of the freezer. She sliced the loaf, rewrapped the rest, put it away, and logged it. “ _Thank you_ , Captain Daddy,” she said, smiling. “But I think Mother and I would rather you kept the twins away from the galley.”

“The rest of us would appreciate it, too,” Hazel commented, hooking in to her place at the table.

“They’ve got no faith in our abilities, Grandpa,” Pollux said, with a wounded air.

“It’s unfair to us, is what it is,” Castor replied.

“We were mess cooks in Scouts, after all. We can sling hash if we want to.”

“And it’s not as though cooking is five-space math.”

“Well,” Meade allowed, “I _suppose_ I could let you take breakfast for a while if you’re that set on it.” She put on her best long-suffering face. 

“That’s an excellent idea. I’ll update the duty roster,” Roger Stone said. “You can swap dishes for cooking with the twins for a week; we’ll see if they poison us. And Meade can take over as co-pilot when we course-correct around Ganymede, while we’re at it.”

“What?” all three Stone children chorused, surprised. Meade had been back-up, but she'd never actually been at the controls of the ship before.

Their father remained cool in the face of popular disapproval. “You boys should learn to be competent cooks; it’s a survival skill that everyone should know. And Meade, Hazel says that you rate as a pilot. “Even if you don’t intend to take up the profession, you should have the experience. Don’t worry; Hazel and I will back you up.” He paused. “But you two hooligans won’t,” he said, firmly. “You’ve both proved you can jockey a ship; now you’re going to let your sister try.”

“Yessir,” the twins answered, a little dubiously.

At that point, Dr. Stone appeared with their least child in tow, and that was the end of the conversation. Meade applied herself to finishing lunch- squeezing the sauce into the packet with the now-cooked pasta, spooning the portions into the eating cups, clipping the cups for bread and salad and pasta into the family’s trays. Then she passed the trays out to the table, where Lowell had already clipped the silverware and the napkins into place. Once the food was together, the family hooked themselves in to eat. Captain Stone insisted on keeping an orderly table, even in zero-gravity- no floating around the galley during mealtimes.

Once the meal had started, they were all quiet for a little while, concentrating on getting food into their mouths. Meade maneuvered a sauce-covered noodle onto her fork. She cleared her throat. “If I’m going to be on piloting duty, can Buster take over hydroponics? Just for a few days,” she added, hastily.

Hazel raised an eyebrow. “I thought you wanted him to stay out of the garden,” she commented.

Meade shrugged and swallowed her pasta. “Well, I don’t want him going off his own specs. But I guess if he’s interested in the garden, maybe he should start learning to take care of it, too.”

“He’s awfully young still,” Roger Stone said. 

“I’m old enough!” the topic of conversation protested. 

“Besides, that broccoli is going to need a lot of work,” Meade pointed out. “Buster almost killed it; he should fix it. Maybe that’ll teach him to listen to me about salinity gradients.”

“Sounds fair to me,” Castor put in. 

“No one asked you,” Hazel told him. “Captain? It’s your boat. What do you think?”

“If my Hydroponics Master recommends him, then I suppose we can let Buster take over for a few days,” Roger Stone allowed. “Provided his mother agrees.”

“I think it’s time that Lowell took on more responsibility around the ship,” Dr. Stone said, digging into her salad.

“All right. Anyone else want to swap jobs while we’re at it?” Roger Stone asked. “Got an itch to be a doctor, Hazel?” 

“I did my stint wiping noses and bandaging scrapes when you were little,” Hazel said, grinning. “I’ll leave it to Edith for the time being.”

“Good. Then the new duty roster will start tomorrow, god help us. Try not to poison us, boys.” He unhooked and passed his tray into the dirty-dishes net. “Lunch was excellent, Meade.”

Meade smiled. “Thank you, Daddy!” 

She was still smiling as she flew out of the galley.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was delighted to see your letter; what you love about this book is what *I* loved, too. I hope I did justice to your request. I tried to make Meade consistent with her portrayal in the book, but give her some more development, too. I’m not sure how well I did at fixing that patriarchal streak, though!
> 
> I did a fair amount of research into zero-g cooking and eating. What I wrote is as accurate as I could make it, both to current practice and Heinlein’s fictions about zero-g (although he really doesn’t say much about it, except that they have both dehydrated and canned foods, which is true to how it’s done today). If you’re interested, here are the most useful sources I found:
> 
> http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/factsheets/food.html  
> http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition18/journal_sandra_magnus_6.html  
> http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition18/journal_sandra_magnus_7.html


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I added this later, because bits were niggling at my head. And hey, now it passes the Bechdel test. Barely.

Hazel adjusted her slipstick and looked back at the numbers on the page. Meade chewed her lip and tried not to fidget. Hazel didn’t like to be interrupted while she was checking figures.

“The course looks good,” Hazel said, finally, and Meade felt a rush of relief. “I might have gone a little closer on Ganymede approach; you can save fuel using their gravity. But we’ll use your numbers this time.”

“Really?” Meade said. “We can use yours, if it’s more efficient.”

Hazel shook her head. “If you’re conning this boat, you use your own course. Besides, the close approach is trickier.”

Roger Stone floated into the cabin. “How’s it look, Hazel?” he asked. 

“Here’s the course, Cap’n,” she said, offering Meade’s figures. Mead wasn’t as worried this time; if Hazel had checked them, there was almost no chance that her father would find fault. Hazel pushed off to head down to the engines.

Sure enough, after a moment, he nodded. “That matches my figures,” he said. “Alright- feed ‘em in.”

Meade hooked herself into the co-pilot’s chair and pulled the straps around her. That done, she started entering her numbers into the ballistics computer. Roger Stone hooked into the pilot’s chair and double-checked it from his station. They were using their close approach to Ganymede to correct the small course deviations from their primary burn around Ceres; it was a simpler problem than the initial approach had been, but a misplaced digit could still send them careening off into the vast emptiness of space.

“All correct, Captain?” Meade asked, formally.

“All correct,” Roger Stone told her. “Go ahead and start.”

“Okay,” she said, as much for herself as for her father. She reached for the intercom. “All hands to stations for maneuvers,” she announced. She looked over at her father, who nodded. She reached for the radio and carefully opened a channel. “Ganymede Control, this is the _Rolling Stone_ ,” she said. “Sending final course data on three-alpha-foxtrot-two.”

There was a long silence, and then the radio crackled. “ _Rolling Stone_ , this is Ganymede Control. All received and logged. Proceed with caution. Not that you’ll need it, _Stone_ ,” the operator added, “You’re the only boat blasting for Titan this approach. Just try not to hit us and you’ll be fine.”

Meade smiled. “We’ll do our best,” she promised. “ _Rolling Stone_ out.”

“Ganymede Control out,” the voice answered. “Have fun on Titan.”

It was a similar maneuver to the one they’d pulled when they swung around Earth, blasting for Mars. It was the same basic concept, anyway- using Ganymede to slingshot them in the right direction, on Saturn-ward. Ganymede’s gravity field was much weaker than Earth’s, of course (though a bit over twice as strong as good old Luna), so it was a simpler calculation, and a _much_ less touchy blast.

She switched over to ship intercom again. “All stations report,” she said, keeping her voice as steady as she could make it. “Power room?”

“Hot to trot,” Hazel said. Meade could hear her smile, and it made her feel a little better. Hazel would never have compromised the safety of her family; if she said Meade was ready, then she was ready. Right?

“Passengers?”

“Lowell and I are fine, Meade.” Her mother’s voice was calm, too. Of course, her mother’s voice was always calm.

“Captain?” she continued. “Check-off complete. The boards are green; five minutes.”

“Controls are yours, co-pilot,” Roger Stone told her, nodding. “Power room, unlock and prepare for blast.” He switched off the intercom. “Are you ready for this, Meade?” he asked.

She swallowed. “Yes, Daddy,” she said. 

“Captain!” he corrected, and switched the microphone back on. “Blast in twenty seconds.”

Meade realized that she was sweating. She checked her boards again, checked the scope, checked her straps. 

“Ten seconds-” 

If the computer didn’t blast at the right time- if her numbers had been been wrong- Meade tried to keep her hand steady on the button and her eye on the scope. 

“All hands brace for acceleration in five seconds-”

Roger Stone’s hand hovered over the blast button at his station, and Meade knew that Hazel’s would be doing the same down in the power room. It was their own tell-me-three-times redundancy. Her numbers had been triple-checked, and Ganymede Control had approved them, too. The star shapes in the scope were clear and steady.

She stabbed the button as the acceleration slammed her back into the couch. She counted seconds and reached for the cutoff- but the computer performed perfectly. With a cry of _Brennschluss!_ from the power room, the blast ended. 

She tried not to be frantic as she checked the scope, comparing the star shapes and readings with her expected numbers. In the background, Roger Stone ordered the power room secured and locked. “In the groove,” she said, with relief. She handed over her readings for him to check.

Roger Stone looked over his daughter’s results. “Well done,” he said. 

“Thank you, Daddy,” Meade said. Her head felt a little light, and not just because of the return of weightlessness after the burn. 

Her father smiled at her, a little wry. “It’s that way for me, too, you know,” he told her. “Every time.”

She swallowed. “It’s exciting,” she said. “But scary.”

Roger Stone nodded. “You just have to let that worry make you careful. There’s no such thing as a routine burn, not even for a twenty-year pilot.”

Meade nodded solemnly. “Yes, Captain Daddy, sir,” she said. But she meant it.


End file.
